Page 61 of Captive

She looks at my hand. Then at me.

“Did you just secure my office supplies?”

“Temporary hazard correction. No ongoing jurisdiction claimed.”

“The paperwork will be extensive.”

She eats another bite. Then she reaches over without looking and slides my plate closer to me, because I haven’t touched it.

It’s such a small thing. I don’t know why it makes my throat close.

My pain has climbed from four to six since the meeting. She notices before I decide whether to report it.

“Six?”

“Yes. No heat, no numbness, no blood.”

“We go home after Tessa’s call. I check the bandage. You take the pill and sleep.”

“You sleep too.”

“That was contained in the plural.”

Home. She said home, and she said we, and I don’t think she noticed she did it.

I noticed.

While we wait for it, she makes me put my leg up on a second chair and sits across from me with the schedule.

“Can I ask you something that isn’t about this?” she says, without looking up.

“Yes.”

“If you lose the job. If the review says you’re done at Barbed Crown. What would you do?”

I’ve been trying not to think about it for five days. It comes out anyway.

“Handling,” I say. “Stockmanship. Teaching crews how to move cattle without hot shots and yelling. Half the injuries I’ve ever seen, people and animals, came from somebody trying to be stronger than a cow.” I look at the table. “You said that to me the first morning. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.”

She sets her pencil down.

“There are programs,” she says. “Extension courses. Ranches pay good money for somebody who can cut their injury rate. You’d be good at it.”

“I locked a woman in a room.”

“And then you spent four nights sitting outside the door making sure nobody else got to her,” she says. “You don’t get to only count the one.” She picks the pencil back up. “I’m not saying it fixes anything. I’m saying you know how to hold a light for something that’s hurting, and not crowd it. That’s the whole job.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. She doesn’t need me to.

* * *

Tessa’s call comes in at eight. She’s on the kitchen wall screen with Garrett and his lawyer beside her.

She’s found four payments to Vale’s company out of a lender reserve account tied to Barbed Crown debt, filed as field compliance. Three land near the dates on the forged papers. The fourth is scheduled for right after the next load arrives.

Then Garrett’s lawyer points at the payment order code. Every ordinary reserve page reads one, then two. The Vale payments read two, then one. It’s the exact swap in a debt schedule Calvin signed three days before he died, a schedule Garrett never described to anyone in the family. Russell called to say it never took effect before anyone had told him what was in it.

He knew what Calvin had changed before anybody told him.